Starting to Develop for Salesforce

I headed down to Dreamforce15 on Tuesday morning. I got my conference app on my iPhone to help sort through the over 1400 sessions they offered. Being a total newbie, it was hard to sort through their zoology of jargon and product names: Lightning, Trailhead, Force.com, Service Cloud, Workflow, etc.

For the first session, I picked something developer-centric “Apex Quick Start” and “Lightning App Builder Quick Start.” Sounds like to good sessions for a start. Apex is Salesforce’s programming language to interface with the database and Lightning is an application development tool. The sessions had me sign up for a developer account and introduced me to the developer’s workspace and was a guided tutorial of what’s freely available online called “Trailhead.”

It was a great intro and the tutorials were easy to follow. They also came with quizzes that checked your work on your dev account to see if you had followed the tutorial correctly. Pretty neat. But what I found out later was, I probably didn’t need to go deep into custom development. As an Admin, I could get the app I was designing done, wholly within the native Salesforce software. So my goal then turn to learning to become an Admin first, then moving to App Development when it’s required.

Here’s my recommendation for starting into Salesforce:

• Open a developer account, whether Admin or Developer, to get a developer sandbox – https://developer.salesforce.com/
• Use their free online tutorials, “Trailhead” – https://developer.salesforce.com/trailhead
• Pickup free books on Salesforce – https://developer.salesforce.com/page/Developer_Library
• More workbooks – https://developer.salesforce.com/page/Force.com_workbook
• Read this one first: https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.fundamentals.meta/fundamentals/
• And the forums: https://developer.salesforce.com/forums